Television

For all the "I-Team" graphics and driving music, enterprise reporting -- the serious, proactive journalism that local TV so heavily promotes -- is dropping precipitously.

Introduction and Summary Television news is in trouble with the American public. Fewer adults are regularly watching it these days. Viewership of nightly network news is particularly hard hit. Fewer than half the public (42%) now says it regularly watches one of the three nightly network broadcasts — down from 48% in 1995 and 60% […]

Report Summary Melodramatic court trials carried on television recently have enjoyed huge audiences in the United States, a new nationwide Times Mirror survey found. Fully 43% of the American public have watched at least four of five of the most sensational trials aired on TV within the past few years. The survey also suggests that […]

REPORT SUMMARY Many more Americans express concern about the amount of violence on entertainment television programs than about the increasingly violent content of broadcast news.  TV news, while seen as containing more graphic violence than in the past, is also seen as reflecting the reality of a violent society. Further, a large sector of the […]

Report Summary The believability of NBC News has been diminished in the eyes of the public after it admitted that it staged the explosion of a General Motors truck during a segment of the newsmagazine program “Dateline NBC.”